Tech Half of Japan's businesses still use Internet Explorer

Microsoft has been sounding the death knell for Internet Explorer for months, but many businesses in Japan seemingly did not take heed. Almost half were said to still be using the browser, for which Microsoft ended support yesterday, as of March. According to Nikkei, many of those companies have dragged their heels on switching to other browsers, which some have warned may cause chaos for months.

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Anybody shocked by this?

Probably IT departments need to fax and seal their upgrade requests... no, I'm not surprised.

Browse some info about Korea -- I think IE has been near 100% for some things there, condoned by and embedded in a lot of government and banking sites. Because of this, Macs have historically been excluded/unused.

A lot of this goes back to things like ActiveX and related bits of code in IE. Back in the day it was one of the only ways to have "applications" on the web and interaction with local, to the client, devices. Unfortunately a lot of businesses wrote custom applications around this functionality and those apps just kept growing and becoming more complex. Instead of biting the bullet and re-writing from scratch in a more universal code base the companies just kept nursing them along and hoping the functionality would never go away. The writing has been on the wall for a long time though so there should have been a move away from these long before now.

If it works it works, right? People only change when they get scared.

HanSolo said:

If it works it works, right? People only change when they get scared.

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They should have been scared a long time ago though. ActiveX has had a long history of very bad security vulnerabilities.

johnnyG said:

Browse some info about Korea -- I think IE has been near 100% for some things there, condoned by and embedded in a lot of government and banking sites. Because of this, Macs have historically been excluded/unused.

Web compatibility issues in South Korea - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

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Wow, I wonder why Asia is so slow when it comes to pc, come on even Korea lol, it's like they can be very savvy when it comes to mobile while for whatever reason desktop stuff is never worked on, I wonder why such drastic difference between devices

Apart from IE, another aspect of 'old' that's embedded in something is copiers. It's been a few years, but I was surprised once when I discovered the school copiers still ran on some kind of DOS-like OS. That if you wanted to print from a USB stick, it had to be formatted that way for it to be readable.

Copiers (such as printing stuff at a combini) also leave a big security hole, since they retain most everything they've copied on an internal drive.

johnnyG said:

Apart from IE, another aspect of 'old' that's embedded in something is copiers. It's been a few years, but I was surprised once when I discovered the school copiers still ran on some kind of DOS-like OS. That if you wanted to print from a USB stick, it had to be formatted that way for it to be readable.

Copiers (such as printing stuff at a combini) also leave a big security hole, since they retain most everything they've copied on an internal drive.

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Most modern copiers run Linux/UNIX (BSD). Not all copiers have internal drives, these days the jobs are usually just kept in memory (RAM). Drives are usually for features like keeping a copy of a form/document on the copier so that it can be printed at any time or for handling very large print jobs (large in file size, like print/publication quality documents). I highly doubt that the combini copiers have drives in them at all as it has almost always been an add-on with additional costs in my experience. They would have a small amount of non-volitile storage for settings, maintenance information, and copy/print counts.

But to your point, corporate copiers weather purchased or leased usually do have the drives and if they are junked or sold it would be an easy thing to miss destroying/wiping.

johnnyG said:

Copiers (such as printing stuff at a combini) also leave a big security hole, since they retain most everything they've copied on an internal drive.

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The biggest security hole in copy machines is the doofus who takes the copy from the tray, and leaves behind the original sandwiched between the glass sheet and the cover.

Or, so I've heard.

But seriously, I think there is a bigger issue here that has to do with innovations made in (say) the US, and the countries that don't necessarily want or need those innovations, but are forced to implement them or be left behind only to face bigger, more expensive upgrades in the future. This IE issue illustrates that. There are probably similar cases in the automotive or telecommunications sectors. You could see how countries build up resentment towards these forced upgrades.

Or, am I wrong here. Did Japanese and Korean companies somehow shoot themselves in the foot by rejecting relatively benign, simple, and cheap upgrades?

Majestic said:

Or, am I wrong here. Did Japanese and Korean companies somehow shoot themselves in the foot by rejecting relatively benign, simple, and cheap upgrades?

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No, I would say that they just found themselves in the same situation as a lot of US companies. They built their applications/websites around IE only tech like ActiveX and are now going to pay the price for not investing in a rewrite/replacement of that app/website when the writing was on the wall. It should be noted that the writing has been on the wall for the last 10 years at least for those technologies. Also, as those are all proprietary technologies no one else can extend their life. They aren't open standards at all.

I think you do have a point when it comes to other tech, though I think the opposite can be said as well. I remember Japan having pay with phone (for specific payment systems) back on flip phones, well before the US every had anything like it. That and tap to pay cards with the train/bus networks. It seems like Japan fell behind the US and other "Western" countries mostly because of the lack of a widely accepted payment type (other than cash of course). What I mean by that is that payment platforms/systems are so numerous but at the same time only work at a small number of places. Like stores that take VISA, but only THEIR VISA. Normal VISA card? Forget it! Or the PaTaPa? and/or ICoCa, which have been around for a long time but are still only accepted in a small number of places.